


This Story Isn't About Nita

by Aderam



Category: Young Wizards - Diane Duane
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Yuletide 2006
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-02
Updated: 2013-05-02
Packaged: 2017-12-10 05:44:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,537
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/782477
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aderam/pseuds/Aderam
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This story is set right after the events in <i>A Wizard's Dilemma</i> (the fifth book in the series), and only contains the major spoilers of that book. Considering the subject matter of that book it is sad. Sorry.</p>
            </blockquote>





	This Story Isn't About Nita

**Author's Note:**

> This fic was originally written for LC in the Yuletide 2006 Challenge and posted at [the old Yuletide Archive](http://yuletidetreasure.org/archive/27/thisstory.html). It was the first fic I'd ever finished and my first Yuletide fic. Re-reading it nearly seven years later I'm still kinda proud of it.
> 
> Thanks to Hobbitbabe for the Beta.

After Nita returned from her eventful “vacation” in Ireland she expected that life would return to normal, or at least as normal as life ever was. She wasn’t expecting to find out that her mother had terminal brain cancer, and she certainly wasn’t expecting that after all she’d been through as a wizard neither she nor her sister Dairine would be able to handle the illness and her subsequent death. The following months were some of the most difficult that she had ever had to endure.

But this story isn’t about Nita.

~~~~~

Tap. Tap. Tap, tap, tap.

Tom twitched slightly and tried to keep his focus on the spreadsheets filled with the household finances. Bills were strewn haphazardly across the table, buried by a calculator, a few extra pencils and some scrap paper that was half-way covered in symbols that looked more like the Speech than the simple equations he’d intended.

Tap-tap. Tap. Tap. Tap.

Tom ran the fingers of his free hand through his dark hair as he mashed at the numbers on the calculator’s key-pad

Tap. Tap-tap. Tap.

“Kit?” Carl called from the living room where he was sprawled out on the couch with a book, sock feet dangling over one end like off-white flags of surrender. “Would you please stop tapping before Tom sets another calculator on fire?”

The tapping stopped immediately.

“Sorry,” Kit said sheepishly pulling his hand off the table and into his lap.

“It’s okay,” Tom said giving the teenager sitting across from him a lopsided and understanding smile.

“Right,” Kit said and sighed before returning to watch Ponch and Annie play their bizarre games of tag out on the lawn. But he kept his hands clenched firmly in his lap. Tom went back to his most recent equation and tried to figure out what the Hell he had been doing.

The silence was almost more distracting. Tom sighed as well and put down his pencil letting his gaze follow the tense line of Kit’s back and neck before following his gaze out the window to the two dogs. Currently Ponch was jumping back and forth and over Annie while the slightly more sedate older dog snapped her teeth and used carefully placed pounces to attempt to beat the young mutt. Every now and then she would stare fixedly at Ponch until he stilled, although even then his tail was wagging so hard that his back-end shifted back and forth in an uneven rhythm, and then, after he’d managed to concentrate for a minute he exploded back into action with Annie right behind him armed with a new rule for their game that would be more or less followed by the younger dog. 

Kit sighed and Tom could feel the exhalation down in his very bones. The whole situation just sucked. No wizard liked to watch the Lone Power win, but it was always worse when it was family or friends that He was destroying. Suddenly, Carl was behind him resting a hand on his shoulder and leaning forward against his back, his strength seeping into Tom while the other man’s long arms reached out to stack all the bills and other assorted papers off to the side.

“We can always do these later,” Carl said so quietly that the sound was almost muffled by his moustache.

“And by ‘we’ of course you mean me, right?” Tom added with a sardonically-raised brow.

“Of course,” Carl said and Kit jumped slightly at his words, as if he’d just remembered that he wasn’t alone in the room.

His gaze darted quickly over the stacks of papers and the two Area Seniors standing so close to one another and he pushed his chair back from the table uncertainly. “I can go,” he said the words stumbling slightly as they left his mouth.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Tom said while Carl snorted and carried the bills over to the kitchen counter. “Do you want to talk about it?” he asked.

“No, I’m okay,” Kit said looking back down at his fingers, which looked like they wanted to start tapping again. Carl put on the kettle for tea. 

Tom looked for something to occupy himself, but Carl had tidied away the scrap paper and pens along with the bills themselves and the only thing he had left to do was tap his fingers in a sharp staccato rhythm on the edge of the table.

Tap-tap-tap-tap-tap-tap.

Kit looked up at Tom, an amused look tugging at the edges of his otherwise serious expression.

“Sorry,” Tom muttered and tried to still his fingers.

Carl snorted again as the kettle clicked off and poured the hot water into three mismatched mugs.

“Can’t we do something?” Kit said abruptly and his words seeped through the room as if the walls were sighing. “For Nita and Dairine even if we can’t help their Mom?”

Tom sighed again and Carl half-heartedly deposited the mugs on the table in front of them. “We tried to find something simple for them to do that wouldn’t – you know – that would keep them occupied,” he said.

“Well,” Carl added ruefully as he slipped into the third chair at the table. “We tried with Dairine…”

~~~~~

“Dairine!” Nita exclaimed shocked at the tone her sister was taking while the younger girl stomped down the stairs and into the backyard.

“It’s insulting!” Dairine continued at the top of her lungs turning around to face Nita as she was followed out onto their well-tamed lawn. She stood with her feet planted firmly, hands in fists at her side as if she was expecting Nita to attack her. There was a stubborn set to her chin that gave Nita flashbacks to the days of Dairine in her terrible twos, and her hair was sprayed out around her face like a self-righteous red halo.

Nita stopped just outside the door and quickly muttered a sound-proofing spell around the two of them so that Dairine wouldn’t accidentally yell something they didn’t want the entire neighbourhood hearing.

“I have far more important things to do!” Dairine continued at an impossibly high volume and pitch which left Nita cringing and wondering whether she was being loud only to test the strength of Nita’s spell.

The worst part was that Nita was fairly certain that Dairine was right.

“But this is important too,” Nita added quickly. She had long since learned that the only way to get a word in edgewise when her sister was like this was to speak as much as you could when Dairine was taking a breath.

“Important?” Dairine shrieked. “It’s easy! Even you could do it!”

Nita could feel her temper building at the insult, but she noticed that Dairine hadn’t said that the task wasn’t important and she could see her fury slowly melting. For some reason even that didn’t really help.

“You know what Dairine?” Nita said coldly, her temper over-flowing like an old dam. “Of course I could do this too, but I would fix it without complaining about it. Frayed hyper-strings are a serious problem, and even though they have a simple solution…”

“That’ll take over three weeks!” Dairine started but Nita just kept talking over the younger wizard’s words.

“… Even though it has a simple, though time consuming, solution I would be happy to be a part of that solution because – because – ” she emphasized while Dairine crossed her arms over chest and shifted her weight, a distinctly unimpressed look on her face, “if someone didn’t do something about it then everything would go to Hell.”

Nita glared at Dairine while Dairine glared equally back at her.

“Well,” Dairine said finally, one of her most arrogant looks on her face, “you would know something about the repercussions of failure, wouldn’t you.”

Nita was shocked into silence as Dairine, eyes cold, turned away and wrote out a quick transit spell onto the grass. There was a single tear rolling down her cheek as she disappeared from where she was standing with a loud bang.

Nita, knees weak and eyes painfully dry, sank down into the grass without a sound. It was some time before she remembered to take down the sound-proofing spell and go back inside.

~~~~~

“Dairine never liked taking help,” Kit said dejectedly. “I suppose neither did Nita really.”

“Most wizards don’t,” Tom added with a rueful look on his face suggesting personal experience.

Carl nudged Kit’s mug closer to the young wizard.

“Sometimes,” Carl said quietly clutching both hands around his steaming mug so that his elbow was pressed firmly alongside Tom’s, “the Lone Power wins more battles than we expect, but that’s why we’re fighting in the first place.”

Kit took a slow sip at his tea.

“You’re always welcome to come here,” Tom added after a moment of silence.

“Thanks,” said Kit.

~~~~~

The weeks and months following Nita’s mother’s death were hard, not only for her family, but also for the people around them. Kit became a regular feature at Tom and Carl’s house when he wasn’t on assignment or at school, and together they went through several boxes of tea. He often brought Ponch along and every now and then Nita would come too.

Because this can’t help but be a story about Nita.


End file.
